


John Watson and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad December

by Freebirdflying



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Christmas, December - Freeform, December Challenge, Doctor John, Eventual Sherlock Holmes/John Watson, John had a dirty mouth, Johnlock - Freeform, KatsJohnlockXmas2019, M/M, Sherlock tries to be a good friend, Slow Burn, seriously a lot of swearing, sweary John
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-30
Updated: 2019-11-30
Packaged: 2021-02-25 20:54:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,192
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21621796
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Freebirdflying/pseuds/Freebirdflying
Summary: John Watson is having a bad day.  Or maybe make that a bad week, or, at this point, a bad month.  He just wants to sit in his nice, warm comfortable chair with some nice, warm comfortable food, but apparently it's his destiny to spend the month scandalizing old ladies with his swearing and muttering.  And then, Sherlock is acting...weird.  More than usual.And then things get worse.
Relationships: Sherlock Holmes/John Watson
Comments: 8
Kudos: 27
Collections: Kat's Johnlock Xmas 2019





	John Watson and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad December

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Kat's Johnlock Xmas Challenge. Prompt One: Snow. 
> 
> Rated teen for a lot of swearing; rating may change later on.

As the pleasantly crisp air of autumn gave way to a damp bitterness towards the end of November, the clinic where John still worked part-time got busier and busier, although not more interesting, as the increase was mostly cases of the sniffles and flu. 

Late in the afternoon on the first of December, John glanced up at the clock. An hour left in his shift, and god, he was ready to get home and relax in his comfy red chair. He was only just barely over his own sinus infection, and he was still feeling the effects of several nights of poor sleep due to mouth breathing. 

“Dr Watson? Your next patient is waiting.” One of the nurses popped her head in the door, waving a file.

“Thanks, Helen.” He put the cap back on his pen from the file he’d been annotating for his last patient and stood up. 

“Um…just a moment.” She held up a hand to stop him and stepped fully into the room. “I need to explain…it’s Mrs Johnson, and there’s a bit of a situation…” 

*****

By the time John finally hit save on the notes he had submitted to the clinic’s patient database it was a good forty-five minutes past the time he was scheduled to leave. Mrs Johnson had turned out to have a large rash spreading from rather sensitive areas of the body; nothing terribly unusual about that, but she’d tried several home remedies to treat it herself over the course of several weeks. The unfortunate woman had no talent at all for such things, and her sister-in-law’s recipes had caused an allergic reaction on top of the original fungal infection, and the whole lot by now had a decidedly less than pleasant smell. 

He’d been scrubbing his hands (again) after that fiasco, daydreaming about his leftover Indian food in the fridge (disgusting rash or no; not much could take away his appetite anymore), when he heard the screaming. 

_Why on earth would someone keep both a four-foot-tall poisonous cactus and a three-year-old in the same house?_

There was lots of shouting and drama as John and Susan, another of the nurses, removed spines from the thrashing child and checked for signs of poisoning, as the frazzled father wrung his hands and worried that the kid _might_ have taken a bite and that his mother was going to be atrocious once she found out because the plant had been a gift from her and was now damaged beyond repair (John resisted rolling his eyes; not grandmother of the year, there) and oh god is that blood and…

But he was leaving now. Finally.

“ ’Night,” he waved to one of the cleaners as he reached for the door handle. 

“You be careful getting home! My bus nearly got in a dust-up over on Helton!” 

“Will do!” John mustered up a smile for the old man. That smile faded a bit as his tired brain registered what the man was doing—shaking the snow out of his hat and scarf. 

John opened the door and almost slammed it shut again.

Fuck.

He’d been too focused on getting done with work to look out a window for a while, apparently. The snow was falling thick and fast, and an inch and a half was already coating the tops of cars and any bit of ground that hadn’t been walked on. The icy wind made him suck in a breath. 

Well, he didn’t want to sleep at his desk, and there was that Indian food waiting, and it wasn’t likely to get any better. Not like he’d never dealt with snow before, anyhow. 

*****

_Buggering fucking…_

John was swearing under his breath within a block.

He had politely stepped aside to give more space to a lady helping her elderly mother into a car. His right foot had sunk through a thin layer of camouflaging snow into a rather deep puddle of icy water, which immediately soaked right through the toe of his shoe, leaving him with an uncomfortably wet sock. 

“FU…” John clamped his mouth shut before the word made it completely out and gave a rather strained nod and wave to the elderly lady, who had glanced up at him.

The bus stop on the next street brought even more joy to his evening—according to the ticker, the next bus wasn’t due for eleven minutes, but passengers were advised to ‘expect delays due to inclement weather.’ The bus stand was angled perfectly for the snow to be blowing directly in his face if he waited under the awning. When he tried to step around behind the bus stand to get out of the wind, a large glob of snow slid off the roof and fell right onto the back of his neck. The bits that managed to get under his scarf felt like needles prickling him.

The bus was crowded and humid, causing that awful wintertime situation of being both overheated and sweaty from being pressed against so many people while wearing a coat and scarf but also being hit with a frigid draft every time the door opened. 

And someone was carrying a large bag of some particularly…fragrant would be the polite word, but John wasn’t much in the mood for polite at this point, so fucking nasty it was…foodstuff. He had time to pick out both something fermented and something fried in old oil and still dripping with it, the kinds of smells that clung to your nose hairs. 

There were three eleven-year-olds with shrill voices behind him, chattering about the latest Disney film and shrieking every time the bus hit a bump, there was a draft, or, well, he wasn’t quite sure why, only that they did it much more than seemed really necessary. 

The bus lurched, and someone knocked him from the side, wrenching his bad shoulder. He gritted his teeth to avoid teaching the Disney girls some new vocabulary words and scooted forward to use his other arm to grip a pole closer to the door. 

“Lovely night, innit?” A lady sitting in one of the seats designated for the elderly or disabled, who looked to be in her sixties and was wearing an eye-watering coat of orange and purple paisley, caught his eye and smiled up at him.

“Mmm…” he hummed politely.

“Perfect night for catching pixies! They ride the snowflakes down, you know.”

John tried to appear distracted, glancing at his phone, hoping she would assume he hadn’t heard her.

“My dog caught one back in ’87. It was a wee thing, with a wisp of purple hair. My brother said that that dog wasn’t quite right, but I always thought…”

_Oh god._

He tried to keep the grimace off his face and nodded, if not politely, then not _quite_ rudely. 

*****

The walk around the corner from the bus stop to 221b netted him a wet, dirty knee from slipping in the slush and then…and THEN, the snow had abruptly changed over to a mix of freezing rain and sleet. He couldn’t run for it without sliding and falling again, so he had to slog along with the rain dripping from his ears and soaking right through his coat sleeves. 

He’d dropped his keys, couldn’t pick them up with his gloves on, had to stick his fingers right into the slush to get them, and then freezing rain dripped right down the back of his trousers when his coat pulled up as he bent over. 

He swore with each step and he stomped upstairs to their flat.

“Fucking…buggering…arse…shitty… _bastard…_ bloody…”

“Ah, John. You’re late.” Sherlock glanced up from doing something revolting to some entrails that John really hoped weren’t human. Hard to tell by the smell.

“No shit, Sherlock.”

Sherlock narrowed his eyes at him and muttered something about phrases used by idiots in school. John didn’t care.

“Ah, is it still snowing?”

John just glared for a moment. “If you can’t deduce that for yourself, or hell, just look out a window occasionally, you can stop calling yourself a genius.”

“Hmm…tetchy today.” Sherlock gave a bit of a nod and then turned his attention back to prodding the entrails. John desperately tried not to notice that they were twitching a bit as he stomped up the stairs to his room to change clothes.

*****

Feeling marginally better in his third-favourite pyjama trousers and the rather scratchy jumper Harry sent him last Christmas (he really needed to do laundry), he plodded back down again. 

He was home, dry, and he’d probably be able to feel his fingers and toes again at some point. He could eat in the sitting room if Sherlock was still playing with the quivering _no, don’t think about it don’t think about it_ intestines at the table. 

Nice hot microwaved chicken korma would make up for it all, just a bit.

“John! Which enzyme splits amino acids, chymotrypsin or carboxypeptidase?

“The second one, I think.”

“You _think_? Accuracy is a necessary component of…”

John stared at Sherlock until he stopped talking. “Yeah, sorry, I’ve had a tiring day. I just want to eat my leftovers and go to bed.”

Sherlock gave him a rather warmer look than he expected, then started to look over him more carefully. 

“Your last patient was a child, a loud one, and you now have a headache. The back of your neck and your left hand are both red, so…”

“Yeah, I know. I was there.” John smiled wanly and tried to step around Sherlock, who didn’t seem inclined to move, even if it meant the two men brushing past each other at an extremely close distance that most polite British men would take pains to avoid. 

Sherlock’s expression changed, and he almost looked…contrite.

_Uh-oh._

“Alright, what did you do?” Better to hear the worst now.

“Well, if you recall, a few months ago, I discovered that running both the microwave and my current converter from the same outlet consistently trips the breaker for the kitchen?”

“Yes…” _Oh god. Please don’t be anything I have to clean up._

“Last night, I may have been so absorbed in the logistics of my experiment that I may…” Sherlock pasted a sheepish look on his face and pushed on. “I _may_ have repeated that experiment inadvertently.”

“So, you tripped the breaker. And?” _This doesn’t sound so bad so far…_

“I didn’t want to disturb Mrs Hudson by going down to the basement at midnight to reset it.”

John narrowed his eyes. _He was sulking about it, more likely. Unless he tromped down the stairs like an elephant, Mrs Hudson needn’t have even known._

Sherlock ruffled his hair in a way that made him look younger ( _trying to win my sympathy)_ and continued. “My intentions were to reset the breaker this morning or to ask you to on your way out. However, just after you left—and you seemed a bit rushed, so I didn’t want to burden you with it…”

_Since when has he ever concerned himself with burdening me?_

“Just spit it out, Sherlock,” John sighed.

“Molly called, and I, in my haste to review the extremely time-sensitive evidence found on a corpse, neglected to flip the breaker.”

“Well, the lights are on in here now.” _Why didn’t I notice this morning? Oh, yes, I overslept and grabbed a coffee at Speedy’s on my way out instead of coming in the kitchen._

“Yes. I attended to the breaker as soon as I arrived home.” Sherlock paused. “At 6:30.” 

Only an hour before John. _Wait, how did he not realize it had started to snow? Either walking around while in his mind palace again—at least he didn’t trip over a cat this time—or he deleted the weather after coming in…_

“Ah.” _Why does he look so penitent? The power’s working in here now, and I didn’t even know, so I wasn’t incoven…oh._

John realized the implications when he put his hand on the refrigerator door. His face fell.

“So, my chicken korma?”

“Still in the refrigerator…but, the refrigerator was not operational for roughly eighteen hours and forty-two minutes.”

“Well, refrigerators are quite well insulated, so as long as the door wasn’t opened often, most things should still be…”

“Unfortunately, there was a slight incident with the door. When I…”

“No. Nope. I don’t even want to know, Sherlock. I just want to eat my food and not die.”

John opened the door anyhow and stared at the container for a moment before opening the lid to sniff. Did it smell off? A bit? Hard to tell for sure if he was smelling dodgy chicken or if it was the lingering smell of fresh guts on the table. 

_Fuck_.

It was somehow worse than if the food had been definitely, completely destroyed. Now he had to agonize over whether to risk a bit of food poisoning. He might be binning perfectly good and much-desired food, or he might be spending the night in the loo…

“What else do we have in?”

“I think the Weetabix are only a little stale.”

_FUCK._

**Author's Note:**

> I've always wanted to try one of these prompt challenges, and I wanted to write something quick before really getting into my big multi-chapter Mystrade WIP in earnest. 
> 
> Disclaimer: I have never done a challenge with time constraints like this. I will almost certainly miss days and I may end up having to combine some prompts. Writing and posting quickly like this is not my usual M.O. at all, so I may fail spectacularly. Just be forewarned that this is a WIP and I make no promises. 
> 
> I was going to say that some chapters will be quite short, but I am the person who thought 'Bringing Greg Home' was going to be 5k and it turned out to be 70k, so who knows. 
> 
> John's going to be swearing a lot in this fic; if you have any suggestions for good British vulgarities, let me know!


End file.
